Bridging the gap between the model-driven architecture and ontology engineering

Software engineers have many robust commercial tools available to them for creating and manipulating models. Due to the widespread adoption of the Object Management Group (OMG) standards for metamodel definition, model serialisation and programmatic access to models, many of these tools are interoperable. Currently this is not the case for ontology engineering tools. This paper discusses the potential benefits of making the OMG's model-driven architecture (MDA) technology applicable to ontology engineering, and in particular, describes a technique for converting ontologies serialised using the XML metadata interchange (XMI) format to an equivalent representation using the resource description framework (RDF), without any loss of information. The resulting models can then be analysed and transformed using existing RDF tools. The technique is applicable to any ontology modelling language that has its abstract syntax defined using the OMG's meta-object facility (MOF) model. This research helps to bridge the gap between the MDA and ontology engineering by providing a technique based on the familiar RDF language for defining transformations between other types of model (such as UML) and ontologies, between different ontology modelling languages, or to modify ontologies without changing the language. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.